@Mellow Hudson Mike posted:Both very valid points, however the latter has only really risen to the level of a true detriment as TMCC/Legacy and DCS have entered old age.
When they were new the market was different and not only tolerated them but expanded rapidly because of them.
In hindsight were they a good idea? At the time yes because the market grew nicely. Now, in retrospect, clearly not so much.
Mike
It was never a good idea to have 2 different systems from the point of the user base. In the scale world if you had had incompatible systems it would have been a mess and command control likely would be a niche product. The NMRA making it a standard allowed DCC to thrive IMO.
There is an analogy right now with the EV market ( and please, no comments of whether you think EVs are evil or great ,that is not the point). One of the issues right now is there is no standard for the charging heads when you plug in. As a result there can be problems with charging stations,esp if you want rapid charge.
Unfortunately for us we don't have that. TMCC came first, and by the time PS 2 came along there was no bridging the gap,for a variety of reasons we all know.
They could have done what DCC did and have basic control functions like speed control, couplers and the like be the standard, then compete on extensions ( like speed control steps or advanced sound).
It worked bc people had no choice unless to stay with one vendor. The DCS to TMCC/legacy functionality made it a little less painful,but you still had to buy both systems.
One thing that time had shown is that proprietary systems generally don't fare well. I like the Apple Mac computers, but because they kept it a closed system globally it is dwarfed by windows. In the computer world proprietary large scale computers are a niche, the dominant systems in almost everything are running Linux or other unix variants, the hardware is pretty much Intel based servers.
Obviously this is all academic, it is what it is. With even cab 1l systems in short supply, you do what you can,thankfully at the least they run conventional other than lc. It is also nice the universal lc remote and the app can control any of the engines mentioned as well.
